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Prescription Drug Abuse

Welcome to the webpage for Prescribing Our Future: the 2011 Atlanta Summit on Prescription Drug Abuse. Hosted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Georgia Drugs and Narcotics Agency, and the Medical Association of Georgia Foundation, this one-day summit was designed to address the exponential growth of prescription drug abuse and addiction in Georgia.

This webpage is designed to serve as a site where members of the community and the media can visit to learn more about the challenges presented by, as well as possible solutions to, prescription drug abuse. On this page, you can find information prepared by speakers and participants at the summit that identify the skyrocketing mortality rates created by prescription drug abuse, societal costs, challenges faced by health care providers, and many other topics.

For example, these materials show that:

Abuse of prescription drugs is the fastest-growing segment for illegal drug use in the United States. More people abuse prescription drugs than the number of people who use cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin combined.

Recent statistics show that the number of people who died in one year from overdoses of prescription drugs alone (508) is more than six times the number of people who died from overdoses of all other illegal drugs combined (86).

The number of emergency room visits attributable to the abuse of prescription drugs increased by 97 percent from 2004 to 2008.

The explosive increase in prescription drug abuse is of particular concern among teenagers. Recent statistics show that 1 in 5 teens reported that they have abused prescription drugs to get high, and 1 in 7 reported doing so in the past 12 months.

We invite you to read the materials on this page to learn about prescription drug abuse as well as what you can do to help solve this problem. We also have provided links to many helpful websites that provide additional resources on this issue.